John Brown on the hazards of tampering with the gospel

I preached Sunday morning on Another Gospel from Galatians 1:6-10.  Here are John Brown’s comments on Paul’s attack against false teachers in the churches of Galatia who took his “system of pure grace” and converted it “into a variety of the law of works”:

It is a most hazardous thing to tamper with the gospel of Christ.  It must neither be abridged nor enlarged.  It cannot admit of either without injury.  An apparently very simple addition may completely “pervert” it.  It seems to many no great harm to substitute, in the room of the plain scriptural statement of the gospel, a system which makes our faith and repentance, in connection with Christ’s sacrifice, the ground of pardon; but we find the apostle pronouncing a similar system a perversion of the gospel of Christ—a turning of things upside down—a making of Christ of none effect.  No greater curse can befall a Christian church than to have teachers who , by their confused and erroneous statements, trouble the minds of believers, and attempt to pervert the gospel of Christ (p. 44).

JTR